The Golden Compass

Starring Nicole Kidman and Dakota Blue Richards, with Ian McKellan as the voice of a giant armoured polar bear. Frankly I'm not a fan of fantasy adventure movies - Harry Potter leaves me cold, and these child orientated stories rarely do it for me. The film is based on Philip Pullman's novels - all based on the notion that there are dozens of parallel universes in existence and they are connected in some way. The universe he has created is populated by people who have external souls called daemons in the form of some creature. In this episode Lyra a teenager who is the possessor of a golden compass that can tell the truth to the right person. She will undermine the authority of the sinister magisterium. I have to say that it was about half an hour in that I almost lost the will to live - I was just confused by the premise upon which this is all based. For reasons I couldn't quite understand there was a lot of traipsing about snowy wastes, a battle between giant armoured polar bears, vast numbers of children were encarcerated within a scientific establishment seeking to forcibly part them from their daemons before they stopped changing shape (keep up) whilst Daniel Craig in something slightly more than a cameo role was doing experiments in some isolated laboratory. Maybe I just don't buy the simplicity of the good versus evil thing that is depicted here - but this wasn't exciting, nor truly fantastical enough, nor adventurous enough. It's a bit rubbish really. Rating 5/10